One Broken Shoelace
by mayhit
Summary: Like fireworks, abandoning each other in the night sky.
1. Chapter 1

_Title: One Broken Shoelace_

_Pairing: Catherine/Grissom_

_Summary: "I'll show you ligature marks."_

_Description: Catherine meets Grissom. Speculation on a very heavily speculated relationship._

_Disclaimer: Not mine._

_Rating: R for sex, drugs, and swearing. (All the cool kids are doing it)_

_Spoilers: I think none._

_Feedback: Sure._

_Author's notes: I'm quite a G/S shipper but I respect what the show really is more than my own desire and I've always thought one of the most talented parts of the show was the beautiful relationship between Grissom and Catherine. I speculated. This is **very relationship heavy** so don't read it if you're hoping G/C was always purely friendship._

---

---

February 4th.

The second time you meet Gil Grissom it's at three in the morning and you're getting off the late shift. Grissom is calculating angles in a pool game while you sneak up behind him with your high heels slung over your shoulder.

"Someone like you spends two hours in a strip joint? I'm guessing you have a motive."

"I'm researching a theory for a case."

More than an hour ago someone drunk and beautiful stumbled into him and spilt their gin. You can smell it on him, evaporating slowly. "If you're looking for a guilty party," you say, slowly placing your hand against his chest where you can feel the damp fabric, "then I'm offering to be your man." And a raised eyebrow like a silent dare: "Cuff me."

Years later he'll ask you why you came to him- tired and sallow with drooping clothes and a note pad in his hands in the place of a drink. You'll settle for telling him the half-truth: "You were the most beautiful person I'd ever met.

What you won't say is: "you were the only person more exhausted than I was."

That night he takes you to see 'Dark Side of the Moon' synched to 'The Wizard of OZ'. It's already 3:30 in the morning and nothing else is showing and besides, he is adamant that everyone has to see it once just so they have proof it isn't a rumor. "Not everything needs proving," you argue but you can tell by his uneasy smile that he doesn't believe you.

The theater is underground and ninety-five percent of the occupants are high. As the end credits roll you turn to him in your seat. You want to watch the screen flicker against his eyes. "Why don't you sleep?" you ask him over the music. He tells you it's because momentum is the most powerful force in the universe. He awkwardly places his coat around your shoulders in the aisle and asks you the same. "Entropy is a bully," you say while you both fumble in the dark with snaps and buttons. "And I really hate tyranny."

Later, you stand in your apartment and lean against your front door a moment before sliding to the ground. Sitting with your head pressed against the heavy wood and your bare toes on the carpet you come to two realizations: first: the only difference between his answer and yours was anger.

_"And who'll deny it's what the fighting's all about?  
Out of the way, it's a busy day"_

The second?

He's never even touched you.

---

February 29th.

He comes to The French Palace again. It's been three and a half weeks since the theater and when he walks through the door he looks across the room and sees you hanging upside down from a pole. It's 'Comfortably Numb' creeping out of the sound system. You consider it coincidence.

This time when you come off the stage at the end of the night you've got two and a half lines of coke up your nose ("Gotta celebrate the extra day.") and your heels are still on. You take two steps down the side stairs towards him and miss the third. He catches you inches from the ground. His arms are strong and careful but he holds you like a child cracking an egg- as though he isn't certain he's done it right. "Catherine, why are your shoes still on?" his breath against your ear is as affecting as a fingertip.

You pull yourself standing but leave your hand with the fingers spread against his chest. This touch between you is becoming a habit. "I can't feel my feet anyway," you shrug and it's meant to be a joke.

---

April. No flowers this year. "But plenty of crickets," chirps Grissom.

Another two months before you dare to dig your fingernails into his shoulders and pull his mouth to yours. So gracefully tugging him backwards down the long hall to your bedroom. You only make it half way there before you've got your hand down his pants and you're swearing into his mouth. "Fuck this. Get on the floor."

With Grissom it feels like your first boyfriend all over again. Experimental ice cream flavors at a parlor you haven't visited since you gave up dairy for cocaine. You tell him as much. You spend three nights sitting across a diner booth from him while he teaches you how to write in Greek. The only time he touches you is to guide your hand over the scratch of letters and after the first night you realize Gil Grissom doesn't desire the way other people desire.

"Desire is a verb," he tells you, "but it should be a noun because it is a thing more than it is an action." The waitress brings you an enormous platter of fries and you ask her for sugar packets as she leaves. "To aspire means 'to seek' as well as 'to want'. Aspire is a very active verb."

You lick your quick pink tongue along the rim of you milkshake glass but receive no response from Grissom. "The men I dance for desire me," you say.

Grissom watches you as though you were a pocket watch. He is not so much concerned with the time as with the way you've been put together- as though one day he will need to take you apart.

"I _aspire_ you," he says. He watches you sprinkle sugar over your fries with fascination and doesn't say a word about it.

---

May and June consist of the living and the dead:

Dead bugs covered in chocolate and live bugs in jars on your windowsill, catching sunlight. The feeling of his lips as natural as falling leaves and the violence of cocaine, like chemical bleach making everything brittle. Grissom calls it "The Skeleton Effect." He tells you how to use a microscope and mercury to test what your coke was cut with but he never tells you to quit.

You get three days off in June when one of The Palace's girls turns up in a dumpster. All you can think for a week is: _"We wore the same lip color."_ Grissom works 32 hours straight on this case before he's sent home and it's the next afternoon when Brass phones him to say that their suspect walked.

He comes to your apartment door that night with a tulip in a coffee cup. "It was on the sidewalk," he says while you search your cupboards for a pot. "Someone pulled it up by the bulb and left it in the middle of the sidewalk." One of the yellow petals falls off when he sets it down. He stoops to retrieve it and the shed petal looks important in the palm of his hand- valued. You give up your search for a suitable container and cross the kitchen to stand in front of him. "People don't respect the living," he concludes sadly. You put your hand over his with the petal pressed between your palms and you lock his fingers with yours. You straddle him against the couch and with only one hand each it takes you two minutes to remove his pants. You're already moving against him when you whisper an instruction against his neck. "Don't let go."

You come fast, screaming fragments of his name and with your hand viciously gripping his. The petal will be wilted from the heat of your skin but you don't let go. You both finally sleep that way, with the smell of live earth between your palms. When you wake the house is silent accept for the faint sound of wind against the walls. You've left a window open somewhere. You both watch in silence as your hands untangle from themselves and separate like a pale clamshell-

Revealing emptiness in your palm.

In shock, Grissom tentatively pulls your hand against his face and breaths in the smell of your clammy skin- the fragrant plant is barely tangible there. "I think this is what belief is like," he says finally, and despite your disappointment you laugh. You must have dropped it in the very beginning.

The petal is on the living room floor- dry and brittle.

---

By the end of June his science experiments are taking up more room in your ancient fridge than food is. He brings a sort of clutter with him and some nights when he's working a 'double' you sit cross-legged in your living room and sort through his papers. You learn about amoeba and bring it up over dinner. He's surprised to hear these scientific quotations tumbling from your lips and he kisses you with sweet and sour sauce still in your mouth. You realize that it's the first time he's ever touched you before you gave him permission to.

The first time you asked him to spend the night he said no. He didn't explain, just said, "No thank you Catherine," and continued pouring plaster into the ice cube trays on his table. It never occurred to you that maybe sometimes he woke up just as terrified as you did.

---

July 4th.

A girl is murdered with a firework. Grissom skips watching the fireworks display that evening to attend the autopsy. That night he wakes beside you, petrified and you put your hand over his chest the way you did five months ago in The Palace-a wordless assurance. You hold it there until you can feel his heart beat slowly drop away. "I have an idea," you say next and it makes him smile with pale lips.

It takes you thirty seconds to have your shoes on and another ten minutes are spent in the miscellaneous aisle at the 24-hour ESSO station down the block. Your purchase three packets of Jell-O: red, white, and blue and you eat the cubes with your fingers as the sun comes up. The blue flavor stains your skin like watercolor paint. When Grissom tries to sneak a scoop of ants into the clear Jell-O you let him and that surprised you both. He puts a blue stained finger into your mouth and now you're thinking, _"Love is in smaller pieces than I though."_

---

Starting July 10th: 40 degrees for two weeks straight.

You bring home royal blue satin sheets and strip the bed of its blankets. He makes ice cubes shaped like beetles and you can hear each other crunching them all over the house. It's thirteen days of ice water and ducking into shadows for a momentary escape from sunlight. On the fourteenth day Marlene from work calls and tells you that Diana is pregnant and Suzan is MIA and Cindy is a big whore and you'll be working double shifts starting 'right the hell now'. Marlene also says, "Oh. And I'll buy you new shoes."

From there it's six days a week of coming home at 4 AM with blisters on your feet and your sequined bra still on. He sleeps on the couch and wakes up when he hears your heels scuffing the carpet in the hall. 40 degrees has turned into 38 degrees and oddly humid. Your feet slide around in your heels no matter how tight you cinch the glittering straps. Now, when Grissom brings you a tray of ice cubes it isn't to eat. You both lay on the couch and he holds your blistered feet in his hands- glides the cool blocks over your skin. One night he presses his forehead to the raw bottom of your foot and holds on tight. It is the first time you can recall that he won't look at you. Instead he just stares blankly down at the couch cushions while the ice cubes melt together in their tray.

You mean to say 'don't worry' and for a moment when he looks up at you, you don't even realize… He gently places your foot down on the couch so that you aren't touching.

All you'd said was 'don't'.

---

August.

The news stations call it a heat wave. You call it, "Hell's god damn sauna". Grissom collects grasshoppers from the withered grass and pins them to Styrofoam boards. Neither of you sleep. "It's like we've forgotten how," you say and Grissom blinks and ponders this a moment.

"Two like behaviors reinforce each other," he says. For the first time you find this concept frightening.

You wear thick makeup to hide the circles around your eyes and when the purple-black exhaustion begins to show through anyway you turn to dark Versace sunglasses. You're skinnier now and the frames are no longer flattering.

Grissom lays you down on the kitchen counter one evening and you put your burnt feet into the cool metal basin. He runs icy water over your toes while you wiggle them, smiling. He carefully removes your sunglasses to see your eyes. Then, so slowly, he slides his finger down the sweaty bridge of your nose like a tiny apology.

There's thunder almost every night now, and together you lie awake listening to the dry rumbling. In the dark bedroom Grissom draws the star signs on your skin. The sheets whisper more than you do to each other.


	2. Chapter 2

Part 2. Things get darker.

---

The 9th of August, 4:01 AM.

Grissom wakes you by pressing a cool jar full of spiders against your naked back. "Let's step on them," he says. "Maybe it will rain." You're messy haired and shaky (fighting off The Skeleton Effect) but Grissom just rolls the cool glass jar between your shoulder blades, eyes placid.

"Gil, you haven't killed a spider in your life."

"Not on purpose." But he's already searching through the slippery sheets to gather you up and carry you towards the balcony…

Five minutes later you're both kneeling, staring at what remains of four small grey spiders- 32 legs in total. "You're a perpetrator now."

Grissom just peers up at the sky and shrugs. "The Greeks called it sacrifice."

The Greeks were afraid of their gods. You'd like to ask him what he's afraid of.

---

The 10th of August, 4:22 AM.

Bathwater crashes against porcelain. You put a towel under the door to silence the sound. You leave your clothes on and hold your breath. When you slip silently back into the bedroom the carpet behind you is damp and Grissom is awake. Without a word you cross the room and lie down on top of him- heavy as wet sand. Beads of water gather and slide in droplets down your hair. In the morning you will both be dry and the bed will be damp. You close your eyelashes against his jaw.

"I love you."

Like an exhalation of breath on glass. You can feel the tendons straining under his skin. You're scared.

---

The 11th of August.

"-but these ligature marks disprove that theory. Darren Hayworth's arms weren't tied in front of him; they were tied behind his back, which means he could not possibly have shot himself at that angle. It had to have been someone who was at least 6 foot 2 in order for the bullet hole to align with the-"

This is where it starts. Eighty-hour weeks back to back to back until all that makes up a life is death. He tries to quote Shakespeare while removing your 4-inch heels but he ends up with Elliot. _"I had not thought death had undone so many."_

You wake after 90 minutes sleep to the racing tumble of his words and it's all gibberish for the first ten seconds. Consonants and syllables and the soft glow of the bedside lamp. He's talking about his case- abrasions and gun shot residue and references to chemical compounds you've never even heard of.

You breathe face down into your pillow while he talks himself through a criminal psyche…

In the morning he pretends you weren't the one lying awake with him for hours. He never says that he shouldn't be talking about an open case and you never ask. It happens again and then a third time before you pull yourself sitting and take a page of his chaotic notes in your hands.

"I bet Niki Rodriguez could give you an ID on your second Vic."

"Who?"

"The designer whose coat your mystery woman is wearing in the lobby footage."

It's a peculiar addiction, this new kind of puzzle with invisible pieces. Five hours pass leaving nothing but the technical names for skull bones and the memory of sleep. The first time you break a case it's at 6 in the morning and it isn't until he reaches across you on the bed to gather his notes that you realize you can't remember the last time anything has been such an aphrodisiac.

Both of you are always exhausted now, but smiling lightly behind your coffee cups. You call him from your car on the way to work to tell him that the clouds remind you of bruises on a cadaver. Eight hours later he meets you at your front door and grabs your hand. He licks his tongue along the rough edge of your thumbnail before whispering, "be careful Catherine."

"I'm not Icarus," you say in return but he doesn't look convinced.

Either way, your nights still end with crime scene photographs spread over the room and your legs locked around his torso. _"I'll show you ligature marks…"_ You kiss the science out of his mouth but it's always back again before the coffee's made.

Sometimes he talks about butterflies and exotic snakes while you straddle him and sometimes you're sure you come harder and longer when he tells you about the 5000 miles the Monarchs fly every spring.

His fingers are magnifying glasses- his saliva is print powder. "You used to wear a ring on your left index finger- I can still feel the indent." Grissom- the perpetual eleven-year-old boy…

You kissed him first in March and it was against your front door and it was when he said he was leaving and it was your hot mouth and his rigid hands and your leg on his thigh. When you finally pulled away to gage his reaction he was already hard and you were undoing your belt with one hand while the other was reaching down his pants. His voice still shook when he asked you, "Would it be alright if I stayed?"

Grissom kisses you as though your mouth is a glass.

Once in April you both lay awake listening to the rain pound on pavement outside you apartment. "Water is the most valuable substance on earth," he said. It was just one sentence spoken into the dark bedroom. You felt loved.

---

August 25th.

One year before Eddie and six years before Lindsey. Grissom drives you both out into the desert with a blanket and a basket full of plums. It's 3:36 AM.

Dust rises off the ground behind the car and leaves chalky tracks to settle. "How many cases have you solved using vehicle tracks?" the look he gives you in the rear view mirror is the only answer you need. _Too many_.

"We're here," he says instead.

From the trunk he takes out a jar full of fireflies and sets it on the hood. The night smells like hot earth and you can see glistening fruit juice on his lips, nearly invisible in the dark. You've already begun to loosen the lid on the glowing canning jar when he stops you urgently. "Eat these first." HHHhe pushes two small round plums into your palms- like black stones in the darkness- a comforting weight.

The sticky plum nectar drips down your hands toward your elbows in the dark. "Now let them go," he instructs once the ripe fruit has been devoured. When you unscrew the lid you hold your breath. There is, you think, a sadness about this. There is meanness in a world where every beautiful thing is fiercely independent. You had a mother who told you, "Cash up front," and had sex with Sam Braun while the bedroom door was half open. You believe things leave because it makes them better than the things that stay. Then you hold up the jar and try to memorize the glow of Grissom's face in the yellow light- something sacred because it is forever. The lid unscrews and the light dissipates.

Five insects like a single silent firework abandoning each other in the night sky.

When the first small winged light bulb returns to hover around your hands you declare it confused. _"Drunk bug. Lay off the nectarine's buddy."_ When the second one comes back you realize they can smell the fruit juice on your skin. When all but one of them comes, you look through the faint light at Grissom and he says, "I knew it would work," and then you cry. He knew you would. He watches you from the shadows with bewitching eyes.

December 8th, 2:58 AM.

Grissom finds you in the women's washroom at Marlena's Nightclub. There's soggy toilet paper on the counter and a puddle of something liquid soaking into your skirt. He must be ashamed to come in here but he never talks about it afterwards. You're slumped under the counter, having crawled as far from the door as you can get and you're holding the U-bend in the drainpipe like an anchor. There's blood on your forehead and on the edge of the counter- doesn't take an investigator to know who hit what.

"Jim! I've found her. Bring your car around; we're going to the hospital."

He holds your eyes open like a doctor and bends your head awkwardly up to face the ceiling light. "Catherine, come on Cath. Talk to me. Catherine! Tell me about that whale you danced for- remember what day it was?"

"My birthday… he gave me a thousand… he… a big… tip." You feel like a cadaver, drunk on embalming fluid.

Grissom picks you up in his arms and- for just a moment- he stands stark still looking in the mirror. There is quiet then- more in the way he holds you than in any measurable decibels. Only quiet and the smell of his breath in your hair: after all of this, he's still the sober one: club soda and ice water. "I'm not Icarus," you gasp, "I'm not Icarus," but in the cracked bathroom mirror his reflection is almost disgusted.

Years later you will consider this the moment he left you. In the women's bathroom with dull pounding bass behind the wall and your blood on his shirt. The next day you stay in bed until 4 in the afternoon and make your way to the living room where you lean against the doorway, shaking.

"I think The Skeleton Effect is going to take a while to wear off this time."

"I'm taking the week off work," he says before turning back to the manila folder in his lap. "There's apple juice in the fridge. It's an antioxidant. You should drink at least five glasses a day."

"Grissom-" your voice catches, as painful as a fishhook in your throat.

"I know Catherine. I know." And for once when you fall asleep he doesn't wake you.

---

January, February, March.

Three months of negative statements ranging from, "He won't leave me," to; "I won't fuck this up," to, "I don't wish I was doing rails right now." It occurs to you later that most negative statements are just mirror reflections of the positive reality. It also occurs to you that Grissom had already begun calling you 'Cath'. You assume it's an endearment but Grissom's endearments are always in the actuality of a thing. The precision is the compliment. 'Catherine' was his endearment.

The first week withdraws entirely into the shadows of your apartment. He tacks the satin sheets from your bed up over the windows and remakes the bed with plain comfortable cotton. Meanwhile you make promises of getting clean as though they were mantras. You promise him and you promise you- ten times, then fifteen.

"Life is too fucking short, I mean really. It's just so _stupid_ I can't even-"

"Catherine?"

"What?"

"The lady doth protest too much me thinks."

A moment's silence before: "Damn it Grissom." To his credit, you're clean for three months before he leaves.

---

March 18th.

The smog outside licks the windowpanes with oil stains- murky and slightly iridescent. Grissom comes over early, before dawn on a Sunday morning. When you hear his key in the door you're watching reruns of 'The Price Is Right' and there is never any doubt that what you still have is over. He hasn't spent the night since Friday.

There is movement in the hall as he leans down to remove his shoes and then you hear him moving into the kitchen. The fridge door opens and faintly, under the sound of forced audience applause from the TV, you can hear him heating something. A spoon is stirring circles in a metal pot. It is five minutes before he comes into the living room with a mug of boiled orange juice in his hands. You can already smell it- violently warming the air. "Heated by stove top, not microwave," he says. When you don't take it from him he sets it down in front of you and you have to bite your lip to keep from whimpering.

It's your favorite drink and he knows it and he's saying goodbye.

He watches you watch the screen instead of him. "Goodbye Catherine," he says. You watch the screen instead of him.

You won't cry again. You did not cry when you were seven and you broke you're arm. You did not cry when you were 21 and your car broke down on the way home after your first day at The Palace. You do not cry when things brake.

On TV someone almost wins a Volvo. They're twenty dollars off the retail price. This 'almost win' feels somehow metaphoric.

He leaves the key you gave him on the counter. It makes a quiet click. You will always consider this the sound of him leaving.

You and Grissom used to feel like the reverse of some children's coloring book. Your chaos- like Crayola scribbles lying down askew across the bed and he, the outline of black ink. He would trace himself along your edges. He would lick your shoulder blades, as thought it was an art in it's self. _"I must apply even pressure from bottom to top." _He hasn't spent the night since Friday.

You can't hear his feet in the hallway, walking away from you the way he could always hear yours. You strain through the grey apartment light but hear nothing.

He leaves you with only the smell of his soap and the bitter taste of citrus. You want to yell after him- to wave from the window. You want to apologize for falling asleep once while he was talking about a murder at the Tangiers. You don't. You're the best goddamn stripper The Palace has ever had and even when you're wearing five-inch heels, you still know how to walk away from a man.

You finish watching the price is right and drink the orange juice he made for you. You pick a hole in the couch cushions while you phone The Palace. "Marlene," you say, "I'm coming back to work."


	3. Chapter 3

_Part 3. Darker still. Buckle down._

---

April.

It rains a lot but you honestly don't give a fuck about 'May flowers'. You dance all night and you read forensics texts from the library when you aren't too exhausted. Grissom left some of his old books but you never touch them. Getting over Grissom has become like getting over the dictionary. He taught you so much you can't even speak without feeling as though his hands are on your thighs.

A week after the break up you find a pair of his boxers in your drawer and you're shocked to discover you don't miss the sex.

Four months after the break up you find a thistle he has left pressed between the pages of one of your novels and you touch yourself in the shower for the next five days.

Grissom told you he would take the purple bloom out when it was soft. "You mean dry," you had corrected but he shook his head.

"If you press a thistle for just long enough the leaves soften and the barbs break off."

When you remove the small plant scrap from between pages 119 and 120 you hold it in your pale palm and think he must have been right. It isn't until you touch the end of one of the leaves that it pricks your finger. Some of the barbs remain.

You silently take the thistle to the window and throw it out into the windy afternoon. You watch it fall.

The next time you see him you tell him about the "non-platonic thistle"- wanting to laugh it off. "You mean, 'non-benign'," he says carefully. You mean platonic but let it go. "_Last night I thought about you in the shower. I'm going fucking crazy."_ You can't possibly explain the vital difference.

---

October.

You dance for a man who says he's a music producer. He wears a nice suit, he tips well, and five months later it's Eddie checking you into the Quinten Runbar Rehabilitation Facility: a very long name for a place where junkies go.

The first time Grissom appears through the visiting doors it's like the second time you've met him all over again accept this time it's Tschaikowsky's 'Waltz of the Flowers' playing softly in the background instead of 'Pink Floyd'. It and five other songs play in a loop. After two hours you consider yourself schooled on the principles of classical music and wish for something from a recent century.

Grissom sits down on the arm of the couch beside you and the first thing you can think to do is joke, "It isn't fair. Strung out patients can't even remember the name of where they're staying."

"You remember," says Grissom, tracing the vine pattern on a couch cushion.

"Excellent," you bite sarcastically. You're angry suddenly so you don't fight it. "Fan-fucking-tastic for me Grissom!"

Everyone comes through the front doors of Quinten Runbar angry. It's the emotional requirement, like a number 2B pencil on a final exam. Grissom understands this and replies only, "Does Eddie visit you?"

"_Eddie_ visits me every day."

"Good," he says in a low voice and it's an epiphany- the light-bulb-over-head kind of epiphany… 19 months ago you sat opposite Grissom in a Frankie's Diner and decided he looked at you as though he would one day have to take you apart. It never occurred to you then, that you were wrong. That he was preparing instead, to put you back together from only pieces.

Visiting hours are over already and as Grissom walks towards the exit you see that he walks bow legged. You laugh. In hindsight flaws become apparent. The waltz plays on in the background. You laugh and laugh. You feel saved.

---

A couple of times Grissom brings in closed cases from work. "I'm teaching you about death," he apologizes one evening before he leaves but you're emphatic.

"This is about life Grissom, not death." Your visiting hours are during the day and he doesn't mention that he's been moved to the night shift. He's as exhausted as you but you can't manage to ask him not to come. You and he sort through photos of blood spatter and autopsy reports and yo-yo's used to strangle children. He touches the ring Eddie placed on your finger at the end of your second date before you could collect your clothing from the floor. "It's no Wizard of Oz," you say and neither of you are sure if that's a joke.

You miss thanksgiving. Quinten has a dinner in the main hall but the turkey is dry and the stuffing is from a box. Eddie comes and swears the whole time because you aren't aloud to eat anything he brings you. He describes the Tupperware container full of white meat and cranberry sauce that they took away from him at the door ("It's my god damn checks they're getting every week!") you run your fingers through his hair and slip one skilled hand under the waist line of his pants when the resident attendant isn't watching.

You can tell he brushed his teeth before he came but he still smells like butterscotch schnapps- thick and sweet. You don't tell him that you hate cranberry sauce. He leaves after half an hour and as he walks away his stride is non-definitive. Grissom doesn't come.

---

Nine weeks in a recovery ward is overkill but Eddie insists. "Lets try to keep you clean the first time," he says on the sixth week, as though he's seen too many beautiful relapses already. You don't tell him about the three months before Grissom left- hot orange juice and ice-cold water and midnight conversations about everything accept your potential for failure.

Grissom brings in a case file about a dead baby in an icebox. When he won't tell you who the perpetrator is you turned your back on him and peer out the window. The strip is visible in the distance, already lit up against the gray fading sky. The city's colors are toxic- radioactive light projecting into the dark clouds. You think that instead of dieing from the radiation the people in the city have all developed superpowers; ones for gambling and stripping and putting drugs into their bodies.

"Follow what doesn't lie," says Grissom from the couch behind you. He is still cross-legged and intent on some detail of a stranger's death. All you can think about this is that it isn't fair. And it isn't rational because a 300-pound man can put his fat fingers into your G-string for a 20-dollar bill but it's Grissom and his searching voice that leaves you feeling invaded.

"Everybody lies Grissom, everybody fucking lies!"

You take his case file from his hands and throw it so the pages flap loudly like grass hopper wings. Seven weeks and you're still enraged, childish. You still want to inhale the fucking Arctic Circle up your nose in one long sniff.

He stands silently behind you where you can feel his breath ruffling your hair and he slides his fingers around the back of your skull as though he could hold its weight for you. Today he smells like cough medicine. "I'm sorry Catherine," he says and he never breathes a word about 'The Evidence'.

Grissom met you two years ago. He was buying Jim Brass coffee at the bar while you sat on a stool beside him and changed into pants and sneakers. You swore when your fraying shoelace broke of in your hand and without a word he knelt and removed one of his own. He placed it on the bar beside you and started back towards his drunken friend.

"Hey Mister! It's a slow night… you want a private dance?"

Good deeds in Vegas are like unicorns- all you had wanted was to thank him but he desired nothing from you. Not even skin and everybody in Vegas wanted some skin. You had another man's business card in your purse and he patiently allowed you to write your number on it before you slipped the card, and your hand with it, into his pocket. That first night with your fingers a little deeper against his leg than they had to be you thought you had never seen a man look so indifferent about a woman.

23 months later you sit in Quinten Runbar Rehabilitation Facility and in the evening shadows he looks exactly the same as that night, or a night in the desert with fireflies, or a night in a women's bathroom…_ Wide bewitching eyes._

Desperation in the straight line of his mouth.

---

Last Halloween there was a party at Jim Brass' house. Grissom came into the second floor bathroom looking for a towel to mop up spilt Vodka. You were already there, bent over the counter with a rolled up twenty between your fingers. You stood and wiped the powder from your nose. He had a fake bullet wound on his chest and one through each foot. He called it, "The Wentworth Case." You were clad in a tiny tweed skirt, tweed push up bra and a magnifying glass. The female Sherlock Holmes.

You watched his eyes travel from the remnants of white powder on the counter to your large black eyes and back again. You shrugged as though it was nothing and slipped past him into the hall. "Character acting Grissom, 6 solution, remember? Sherlock did it."

He watched you disappearing into the shadows of the hallway and he looked undeniably like a corps. The way a victim's eyes go wide as the end approaches. Every time he looked at you as if saying _"Goodbye Catherine."_

---

December 5th.

The night you leave Quinten Dunbar Eddie is called into work. "I can't get out of it," he calls to tell you. It's already 5:30 and you're release is at 6:00. "Fuck! Catherine, I'm sorry."

His voice is static over the line and you only get ten minutes a day on the community phone anyways. "Don't worry about it, I'll see you at the house." Then you call Grissom.

He arrives at 5:58. He's driven the company vehicle and he's got a bottle of water lying on the drivers seat for you. _"Thank god! Something filtered." _You stand in the windy parking lot for a moment and look out across the nearly abandoned ash vault. You are side by side and leaning slightly into each other so that the wind billows his shirt until you can hear it snap. You feel calm despite the rushing of air through the leaves on the pavement. You feel simple.

"Catherine, do you remember how many fireflies were in your jar?" Grissom is holding his hand against the cold metal of the car to steady himself. His hands are chapped from the winter air and you gently touch his cracking knuckles.

"Five." You say, "but one flew away."

"Do you think you're the one that flew away?"

And for all the lies you've told, he looks through strands of your swirling hair and into your eyes- _"I can't solve another puzzle on my own tonight." _You're fingers curl slightly against his knuckles. He is trusting you to tell him the truth.

"I think we are all that fifth bug Grissom, and it doesn't make us beautiful… just a hell of a lot more complicated than insects."

You and Grissom stand close together against his car and you know you still smell like the Methadone treatment they distribute in small paper cups. You wonder if he has ever cried for anyone in his whole life or if maybe he has been given aptitude instead of tear ducts. Either way his eyes are dry, watching yours.

Gil Grissom fed you plums in the desert. He taught you the name of every bone in the human body and he kissed each one of yours in turn.

"I think firefly lights don't go out in the distance, just because we can't see them anymore,"

You will try to be mended.

So you open the passenger side door like a barrier between you and with one of you on either side you hold his fingers to your lips. You want him to be able to feel you speaking. Finally you hold your own fingers to his mouth. "Close your eyes," you instruct and when the world is swallowed in the sound of the wind you whisper, "I think we're all leaving."

He smiles then, like a gift you can only feel.


End file.
